Missing Mechanisms at the Origin of Life - Dr. James Tour, Rice University

Dr. James Tour is a Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University who comes to defend a bold claim: that origin of life researchers are completely clueless about the mechanisms by which life arose on Earth. We start out with talking about Tour’s chemistry work, which includes a method of producing no cost hydrogen fuel and graphene too cheap to meter, the foundations on which he’s built his science empire, and get down to the vital chemistry questions that need to be answered before we can figure out what the earliest cells could have looked like.

00:00:00 Go!

00:00:17 Hydrogen fuel as a byproduct of graphene production

00:08:01 Cost of Production

00:10:58 Patreon Ask

00:12:30 Why graphene?

00:14:43 Concrete

00:19:53 How ideas happen

00:26:33 “T” People

00:31:44 Talking across disciplines

00:42:14 Making space for play in the lab

00:52:08 G_d

01:02:31 Pornography

01:14:11 The gospels

01:21:51 Synthetic Brain

01:27:55 Mechanism and miracles

01:31:26 What makes a mechanism?

01:34:21 Origin of Life

01:43:46 What is the beginning

01:49:40 The debate

02:15:12 Chirality

02:25:29 Closing thoughts

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#originoflife #abiogenesis #syntheticchem

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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.

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